Tech

Rex app makes finding and sharing your favorite stuff a breeze

Filmmaker Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) wanted a way to easily find out what his friends were watching, what restaurants they visited and what music they were listening to. To streamline that process, he created the app Rex, which soft-launched for iOS last month and is fully launching today.

The app is a recommendation platform that lets you share not just what you’re watching/listening to/reading, but also the places you visit with your friends and social network. The app also lets you follow other friends or influencers to see what stuff they recommend.

When Smith conceived of the concept in 2014, he was surprised that other platforms like it didn’t already exist. And although its true there have been other attempts to collect what people are consuming and places they are visiting (RIP, GetGlue), none have taken the holistic approach of Rex.

Rex Explore page

Image: rex/Screenshot by mashable

Item detail

Image: rex/screenshot by mashable

When Smith started telling his friends about the app, he found that not only were they interested in using it themselves, they were interested in investing. Rex has raised $2.9 million in seed funding from investors including Chris Sacca, Sean Bailey and Nick Jones.

Sacca even name-checked Rex in his epic, “What Twitter Can Be” essay that went viral last year.

And after using the app for the last week, I can understand why. Rex is a social network but as Smith says, every item associated with the service is actionable.

Every item associated with the service is actionable

When you see someone recommend a movie, Rex has plugged into APIs that show where you can watch the movie online – whether that’s from iTunes, Netflix, Vudu or another streaming service.

The same is true for music and books. If an album is available on Spotify and Apple Music, both of those choices come up when you tap into the view of an item. Restaurant recommendations open up easy access to its website, a map location and if available, an Open Table entry for a quick reservation.

Rex Home Feed

Image: REX/SCREENSHOT BY MASHABLE

Filter by type

Image: REX/SCREENSHOT BY MASHABLE

You can like and re-share recommendations, the same as with any other social network but Rex also includes a “vault” feature for saving items to access later. Think of this as Instapaper or Pocket, but on steroids.

You can follow your friends from other social networks (Rex can connect to Facebook and Twitter, as well as use your phone number for sign-up), or you can find influencers on the platform to follow. You can also browse their recommendations and the stuff they’ve vaulted.

Rex has a full-time staffer dedicated to going through all of the posts on the platform and deciding which ones will be featured for all users of the app to see, in addition to curating them into sections such as “Weekly Reads” or “1970s Cinema.”

Growing the platform

Right now, the platform has more than 85,000 posts and with the app’s full launch this week, Smith and his partner, company president Ashley Levinson, are hoping for more users to jump on board. Many members of the creative community – including Jimmy Fallon and Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson – are already on the service.

Smith admits that as Rex scales, the ability to look at each recommendation that hits the service will probably go away. While there will need to be a way to scale this process algorithmically, Smith also expects to hire more curators focused on surfacing the best content. But scaling is a problem he’s looking forward to approaching.

Also in the pipeline is a desktop version of Rex and an Android version. The focus right now was on the iPhone, but Rex definitely has cross-platform ambitions.

Adding a reccomendation

As someone who is frequently asked about what apps, movies, books and TV shows I recommend, I really like Rex both as a way to share what I’m into at the moment. But what I really enjoy about Rex is the serendipitous feeling of discovering a recommendation or being of reminded of something I’ve wanted to watch or read, based on my feed.

Rex makes it easy to filter recommendations by content type – and by location – which makes it a cool way to figure out what to do in a new city, or what movie to watch on a Saturday night.

Mashable
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